Seoul Mayor and Land Minister Deadlock Over Housing Inside Yongsan Park

The August 20 meeting between Land Minister Kim Yoon-deok and Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon produced no agreement on the central government’s idea of using Yongsan Park for housing supply: both sides acknowledged their positions remain far apart on building inside the park itself, and the question was pushed to another round of talks next week. The one point of convergence was narrower — land around the park, rather than the park proper, could be examined as a place to add homes.

A Split Over the Park Itself, a Foothold at Its Edges

The disagreement is not about whether Seoul needs more housing but about where the line around Yongsan Park should sit. The ministry has floated tapping the park area — the vast tract in central Seoul returned from the former Yongsan Garrison, which housed the headquarters of American forces in Korea after the Korean War — as a way to inject supply into the capital’s tightest district. Oh pushed back on converting the park’s core, describing the discussion as running on parallel tracks, and instead put forward a compromise: direct any housing development to sites adjacent to the park while keeping the park itself intact.

Kim, for his part, characterized the session the same way — a confirmation of differences rather than a resolution — and said the two would meet again next week to sort the matter out. That framing matters: neither side walked away, and the follow-up meeting keeps a joint announcement in play, but the fundamental question of whether any housing belongs inside the park boundary is unresolved.

Why This Ground Is So Contested

Few parcels in Seoul carry the symbolic weight of the Yongsan site. The grounds served Japanese military purposes from 1906 to 1945, then passed to the U.S. garrison for decades, leaving central Seoul with a rare expanse of undeveloped land once the base relocated. The long-standing plan has been to return that land to citizens as a large public park — which is precisely why proposals to carve out housing there draw immediate resistance from City Hall, even as the same scarcity of central-Seoul land makes the site tempting for a government under pressure to expand supply.

The institutional lineup adds another layer. Kim has led the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport since July 19, 2025, under President Lee Jae-myung’s administration, which has made housing supply in the capital region a headline commitment. Oh, an opposition-affiliated mayor, controls much of the planning leverage inside Seoul. Any Yongsan-area housing scheme therefore requires the two offices to move together — a meeting that ends in confirmed disagreement is not a formality but a genuine bottleneck.

The Compromise Now on the Table

Oh’s counterproposal — concentrate housing on land near the park rather than within it — gives both sides something to work with. For the ministry, adjacent sites still deliver units in the Yongsan area, arguably the most supply-starved part of the city. For the city government, the park’s integrity is preserved and the mayor avoids presiding over the paring back of a decades-old public commitment.

The unanswered questions are quantitative, and neither side attached numbers on August 20: how many units the perimeter sites could realistically hold, and whether that volume satisfies the ministry’s supply targets without touching the park core. If the adjacent-land math falls short, the pressure to revisit the park itself returns. Next week’s follow-up meeting is where that arithmetic — and the political trade attached to it — will have to start taking concrete shape.